


i don't know why you ever would lie to me

by malikjaureguis



Category: Fifth Harmony (Band)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-06
Updated: 2015-01-06
Packaged: 2018-03-06 08:01:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3127082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malikjaureguis/pseuds/malikjaureguis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Lauren feels Camila’s lips brushing her sensitive ear, and the words 'I love you' are quiet, but booming at the same time. Lauren smiles. But she does not say it back." — lauren/camila</p>
            </blockquote>





	i don't know why you ever would lie to me

**Author's Note:**

> So if this looks familiar, it's probably because I originally wrote this as a fem!direction Harry/Louis fic. But rereading it, I realized it worked really well as Camren, and considering I am much more into Fifth Harmony than One Direction, I may as well convert it. So if you liked it when it was Harry/Louis, I hope you like it more as Lauren/Camila!

i don't know why you ever would lie to me

_she said "i don't know why you ever would lie to me."_    
 _like i'm a little untrusting when i think that the truth_    
 _is gonna hurt you._

— push, matchbox twenty

 

“You don’t love me.”

The words are a cold burning in Lauren’s ears.  She can almost feel them like cuts on her wrists - she swears for a second she feels herself bleeding.

“That’s not what I said.”

Camila’s face is hard, with eyes that could cut glass.  Her jaw is set tight, and Lauren can tell she is clenching her teeth hard.  If she clenches any harder, Lauren wouldn’t be surprised to hear cracking bones.  The hotel room is dark, and the red light from the clock that blinks 2:14 AM sheds a bloody shadow across Camila's face.  It’s too appropriate.

“It may as well have been.”  The whisper can hardly be heard, but Lauren doesn’t hear it; she feels it, seeping into her ribs and wedging itself between muscle tendons.  It roots itself inside her, and Lauren knows she’ll now have to carry that sentence around like an ugly tattoo.

Lauren parts her lips, but everything she wants to say can’t seem to reach her mouth, and so she falters before saying instead, “This isn’t a good time to talk about this.  We need to sleep.”

Camila doesn’t move for a second.  But Lauren sees her eyes glow with reluctant tears.

“Fine.”  With that, she leaves.  She’s sharing a bedroom with someone else tonight, it would seem.

Lauren lies alone, counts ceiling tiles until the crack of dawn.

 

(The summer tastes like wine to Lauren.  Camila's weaving flowers through Lauren’s curls, but she’s doing a poor job of it: she’s yanking on hair and the flowers aren’t tying together properly, and instead of looking like the beautiful crowns they see in pictures, it just looks like a sordid mess.

The other girls are roaming the city streets with a girlish delight, Dinah pretending the darker rocks in the cobblestone are lava and must be avoided at all costs.  They relish the way no one does a double take when they pass by; it won’t last long, especially with their bodyguards trailing behind them suspiciously.  But the girls don’t care - for right now, they are just a group of teenage girls whose lives are worth living.

Security side-eye Camila and Lauren, whose hands fold into each other as they walk.  Camila has begun to partake in Dinah’s shenanigans, and Lauren tries helplessly to follow along.  She falls into the lava too many times, as Dinah is quick to point out with sweeping arms and helpless shouts of “No, not Lauren! Dear God, nooo!”  Ally and Normani watch on with heavy-lidded eyes, and wry quirks at the end of their lips.

Needless to say, with Dinah’s shouts reverberating, it takes only seconds for hordes of girls to find them and chase them.  Lauren tries to loosen her grip on Camila’s hand, but Camila just squeezes tighter.  Lauren feels the desperation for their separation suddenly - she doesn’t need tabloids attacking.

Security manages to get them to safety, and as they’re riding back to the hotel the other girls are waving to the fans that try to crowd around the car as it makes its bumpy way.  Camila and Lauren recline back, feeling their hearts beating out the same fast tune.  Camila is fumbling with a smile while Lauren is trying to quell the shaking.

Lauren feels Camila's lips brushing her sensitive ear, and the words “I love you” are quiet, but booming at the same time.

Lauren smiles.  But she does not say it back.)

 

Rehearsal is frigid.  The other girls don’t ask questions, but they can feel the palpable tension cascade over when Camila refuses to look at Lauren.  Lauren looks like a dejected puppy; there is no anger emanating from her, just an overwhelming sense of defeat.

When time allots them ten minutes free, it’s Ally who seats herself beside Lauren against the wall.  Dinah and Normani are doing their best to make Camila her old self again, with Dinah attacking Camila from behind, trying to steal a piggyback ride.  Camila's laughing, so maybe she’s feeling better.  Or maybe she’s just gotten used to hiding her true feelings. (Lauren has taught her so.)

But today Lauren is not faking anything.  Ally watches her with the curious eyes she always has, as Lauren observes her tennis shoes with a keen interest.  Where Normani and especially Dinah use noise to provoke, Ally is silent and respectful - but Lauren prefers that.  Ally always listens, never talks; she restrains herself from offering advice, because she knows advice is not what Lauren is fishing for (though she’d be lying if she said she didn’t wish there was some sort of guidebook for this ugly predicament).  And when Ally does offer advice, Lauren knows she needs to listen, because Ally is wise beyond her years.

“Am I a bad person?” Lauren whispers after awhile, lifting her eyes only to catch Camila's and the temperature in her body seems to drop exponentially so suddenly that she almost shivers.

Ally lets that question hang in the air before she answers.  “You’d be a bad person if you lied.  All you did was tell the truth.”

“But the truth makes me an asshole.”  Lauren’s eyes latch back on her feet.

A pause.  Ally’s face is pensive, but then, when isn’t it?  “‘Many things - such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.’”  Lauren lifts her face to stare at Ally’s, eyes squinting in mock judgment.  Ally allows a tight quirk of her lips.

“C.S. Lewis.” she says, as if that is obvious.

“You and your English teacher sentiments.” Lauren mumbles, and Ally smacks her gently on the shoulder.  Lauren lets herself laugh, and she realizes it’s the first time she’s laughed in a long while.

But then when the laughter stops, the doubt and defeat settles back into the atmosphere.  Ally places a hand on Lauren’s back while her chin wobbles.

“You’re a good person, Lauren,” Ally says, and it sounds so genuine that Lauren wants to believe it, “You’re one of the best people I know.  You would never hurt someone if you could help it.  But think in this way: you’d be hurting her more if you lied.”

Lauren’s chest heaves as she seemingly struggles to breathe.  Ally is right, again.  She just wishes she wasn’t.

Too soon the ten minutes are up, and the girls are being called together for dance practice.  All of them groan, unwilling, as they are put in positions.  Lauren does her best not to exhale when Camila is this close.

 

(“You go first,” Camila whispers, with her legs crossed and her teeth glittering through her smile.

Lauren smiles back as she mumbles a rushed “okay.”  She then reaches her nimble fingers into the coffee mug, filled to the brim with tiny M&Ms.  She collects three, all blue, in her palm, and gets herself situated, stretching her neck out and lifting her hand higher into the air.  Precision is everything.

“Oh, come on, you big baby,” Camila says after Lauren takes apparently too long, “just frickin' do it!”

“Okay, Jesus Christ!” Lauren harshly whispers back, widening her eyes to remind Camila it’s late and the other girls are asleep and they’re supposed to be sleeping too, not catapulting little chocolate pebbles into their mouths.

Lauren leans her head back, opens her mouth wide, and throws the M&Ms in the hair.  Two bonk off her nose, and one lands on the bed.  Failure, again.

Camila makes a smug “hmmph” in the back of her throat as she collects three for herself (she doesn’t take care to match the colors) and quickly throws them into the air.  With grace, they all land on her tongue.  She chews them proudly in Lauren’s face.

“Fucking showoff.”  Lauren grumbles, picking her two blue M&Ms off the carpet and eating them (no sense in letting them go to waste).

Camila snickers, and flicks her eyebrows around so to make Lauren giggle in turn.  The girl is a charmer, Lauren has realized, and she counts an extra heartbeat every time she looks at her.

Without warning Lauren notices that Camila's lips match her jumper, which hangs delicately off her skinny arms.  She notices how the fabric bunches up at the end when Camila leans forward, and how the sleeves are too long and cover Camila's hands so only her little fingers poke out from underneath.  She notices how Camila's bun is crooked, and little errant hairs tickle her collarbone.  She notices these things with a skip in her heart, and feels warmth pooling in her belly at the sight.

And then she notices Camila noticing her, and the girl brings her lips up in a delicious smile.  There’s so much in that smile that Lauren doesn’t know yet, but it doesn’t stop her from grasping Camila's mouth with her own.  The kiss is cold and tastes faintly of chocolate.  Lauren wants to absorb the taste of Camila until she is full to the brim with her.

“I love you.”  Camila murmurs this against Lauren’s lips in a fit of ecstasy.  Lauren pretends she can’t hear it.)

 

“I hate you.” Camila tells Lauren once, after a lunch break filled with an avoidance of eyes.

“You don’t mean that.” Lauren whispers, and she doesn’t think Camila hears her, but the girl stops walking for a moment, and her shoulders seem to dip down in defeat.

“I wish I did.”  This is what makes Lauren’s skin crawl, more than anything else.

This is what Camila says before she walks away.

 

(Camila drags her skin across Lauren’s, and her neck is arched for consuming kisses to scatter the length of it.

“I love you, I love you,” is the chant that reverberates through the room, a whispered confession that bangs its words against the carpet and against the peeling wallpaper.  Camila chants it like a prayer, Lauren’s body the altar as her breasts and her thighs offer Camila some sort of holy communion she could never find in church.

Lauren throws herself into throes of passion, and pants as heavily as she can in tune to Camila’ words because she wants to block them out, wants them to become nothing more than breaths of rough passion that mean nothing.  She wants Camila to stop repeating the same tired phrase that’s never passed Lauren’s lips because to Lauren, it just can’t be.)

 

It’s not that she doesn’t love Camila, because to deny that would be another lie.  She loves Camila, she loves how she can effortlessly talk to her and confess secrets to her, and be around her without the silence becoming soundless needles.  But she cannot feign being _in_ love with her, because every kiss against skin and every exploration of bodies is fueled only by hormones and lust.

It’s taken Camila awhile to realize that, but Lauren would be surprised if a part of her didn’t always know.  How could she not see Lauren’s bowed head and wrinkled smile whenever Camila would mutter such words in her eardrum?

 

“You’re the best part of my life, Camz.”

“Then treat me like it.”

“You know what I mean.”

Camila is tucked into herself, arms wrapped round her knees and chin plunging in between the crevice.  Lauren stands at the doorway, and she’s trying not to let her emotions overwhelm her, but she feels the teardrop when it plummets to her blouse.

“You could’ve at least let me know,” Camila says, “before you... _fuck_ ed me over.”

Lauren’s trembling, and she’s trying to keep from crying because she’s not the one who deserves to have the emotional breakdown.  Camila, the silent silhouette against the wall, she’s the one who deserves to break down.  But then, Camila has become much colder since Lauren has gotten a hold of her. Oh, how the tables have turned.

“I love you, Camz.” Lauren says.  “You make me better.”

“You don’t love me like I need you to, though.”  It cuts like a knife.  Lauren swallows, hard.

“No” is all she can manage to say.  Without sidestepping truths or blurting out lies, it’s all she can manage to say.

There’s a crack in Camila’s surface then: a simple quiver of her chin.  It’s subtle, but Lauren notices every subtlety Camila emits.  It’s the least she can do.

Camila nods, and it sounds sadder than any spoken word.

“That’s a damn shame.”

 _It is.  Yes, it is._   Lauren thinks this as she leaves, because it’s the kindest thing she can do for Camila now.

 

(“I want to love you.”  Lauren says this with Camila tucked into her, with her eyelashes spilling over.  With arms tight around Lauren’s body, Camila grins a lover’s grin.

It’s the closest thing to what Camila wants that Lauren can say.)


End file.
